Welcome to Node REST API tutorial series. Glad to have you here. In this tutorial series I will show you how to write a functional Node REST API using Express JS framework & MongoDB.

First things first. Let’s get our development environment ready.

Install IDE

I use Sublime Text as my IDE. Isn’t it just a “text editor”? No, it’s lot more than that. Check it out @ www.sublimetext.com. Go and install a version for your operating system. Use sublime text package manager to find, install and keep packages up-to-date. You will find wide range of packages @ https://sublime.wbond.net/. Customize your IDE as you wish.

Install Node & NPM - A Node Package Manager

Download & Install Node binary from http://nodejs.org/. Node is installed now, but how do you really know it’s installed and ready to go? Well, open up a command line and type in

node --version

If Node is installed correctly then you should see a node version at command line. With Node comes a Node Package Manager (NPM). If you don’t know what is NPM, then go to https://www.npmjs.org/ and learn more about it. NPM is used to install and manage node packages. Syntax for installing a node package is as easy as npm install package-name --save. Later in the article you will see how we install “express” using npm install command. Super easy!

Install MongoDB

MongoDB is a NoSQL database. A documents database. We will be using MongoDB as a backend for our REST API. Therefore, let’s install Mongo. Go to http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/installation/ and select a binary that suits your platform. I used “manual install”. Pretty easy to set it up.

• Download Mongo binary
• Create a directory called “MongoDB” and extract binaries under that folder
• Create a “data/db” directory to hold databases. Remember, Mongo databases are simply a collection of documents.
• Modify permissions on “data/db” folder for the current user that will be running Mongo. chmod 755 -R /data
• Add Mongo path to your environment. Open “terminal” and run following commands.
  • echo “$PATH”. This will print the current path from your environment. It should look something like /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin
  • mongo -version. Since our system doesn’t know about mongo executable yet, you will see an output “mongo: command not found”. As expected. Nothing to worry about.
  • cd ~ : to go to your home directory
  • pwd : to see your current working directory. In my case I see /Users/rpatel.
  • touch .bash_profile : Creates a .bash_profile file.
  • sudo pico .bash_profile : Edit the file in a pico editor (for mac)
  • export MONGO_PATH=~/mongodb: Exports a MONGO_PATH variable.
  • export PATH=$PATH:$MONGO_PATH/bin : Adds mongo bin directory to the PATH.
  • Restart your terminal.
  • Run mongo -version : And you should see mongo version. I see “MongoDB shell version: 2.6.5”
  • Finally, just to see what your PATH looks like, run : echo $PATH. Boom, it spits out your entire path. I see /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/Users/rpatel/mongodb/bin

Now you have mongo running on your local machine. Next, let’s install ExpressJS framework.

Install ExpressJS

What is ExpressJS? It is,

"Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for NodeJS. "

Straight from ExpressJS website. In other words, it is a framework for writing NodeJS applications. Using ExpressJS you can create a front end MVC application or a barebone REST API. I love it.

• Make a project directory.

mkdir express-api

• Change directory to express-api

cd express-api

• Run npm init : We are using node package manager to install and manage our packages. So what is npm init? It initializes your package with a “package.json” file. This file holds true metadata about your project. Read more on package.json @ https://www.npmjs.org/doc/files/package.json.html.

npm init

• By Running npm init it will ask you series of questions. Pretty much information about your project. Answer these questions and you should have a project.json file. Here is my package.json file,

• Run npm install express --save : This command will install expressJS in our project. By specifying --save at the end of this command it ensures that our package.json file is modified with the express dependency.

npm install express --save

In the image below you will notice express dependency saved automatically into our package.json file.

{
    "dependencies": {"express": "^4.10.0"}
}

Now, open Sublime Text. Click “File | Open” and browse to the folder that contains “express-api” aka your project folder. Click on “express-api” and select “open”. You will see express enabled project in the IDE. This is what I see when all said and done.!

I am a foodie. I love good foods and therefore, in this series we will be creating a REST API for creating, updating and pretty much managing the entire recipes collection.

In Part II, we will look at setting up the backend in MongoDB. See you then.